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NEWS |
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Anti-Obama
Forces Unite Behind New Slur
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For Immediate Release Contact: Alison Omens 202-637-5018
Statement by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney On the July Jobs Report August 1, 2008
The Bush economy has made 2008 a tough year for working people - - and we’re just over half the way done. In total, we have lost 463,000 jobs since the year began, this month adding another 51,000. As working families will be the first to tell you, the job market is deteriorating rapidly and things are expected to get worse before they get better.
Everyone’s struggling these days to squeeze by. And there’s a reason the recession is hitting working people particularly hard. Wages haven’t recovered from the last recession, meaning that working people are starting off with less to lose. In fact, we’re on top of a generation-long stagnation of wages and rising financial insecurity.
The president and Congress must act now to help working people. We need further urgent action to keep more families from losing their homes. We must work to pass a second stimulus program which includes fiscal relief to state and cities and extended unemployment benefits, as well as funding for food stamps and ready-to-go construction to repair schools, roads and bridges -- construction that will to help create good, family-supporting jobs.
But immediate assistance is not enough. It’s past time to deal with the longer term, structural imbalances behind the current crisis. We must rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity and restore our nation’s competitiveness. We must reform our financial institutions to ensure the integrity of our capital markets. And, most importantly, we must enact the Employee Free Choice Act to ensure a fair process that gives workers the freedom to bargain for better wages and benefits and rebalance power between labor and management. America’s workers are the most productive in the world and should share in the benefit of their work.
Republicans in Congress, Pres. Bush, and Sen. McCain have hemmed and hawed their way through any kind of relief. Working class voters will look closely at who’s for good jobs and an economy that works for all - - and who has worked to block them.
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by
Harold Meyerson--Washington Post |
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Offshore Drilling Won't Help But "Green Stimulus" CanBy Mark Weisbrot This op-ed was distributed by McClatchy Tribune Information Services on July 30, 2008, and published in The News and Observer (NC) and other newspapers. If anyone wants to reprint it, please let CEPR know, by replying to this message.
"Gas prices - $4, $5, no end
in sight, because some in Washington are still saying no
to drilling in America," says the narrator in the
TV ad that Republican presidential candidate John
McCain played last week.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. (www.cepr.net).
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Dean Baker on the Bush/McCain Tax Cuts for the Rich and the
Housing Meltdown
A Tax Plan By Any Other Name
The Bush years prove that John McCain's plan to cut
taxes on the wealthy won't promote economic growth.
By Dean Baker
President Bush has the worst record on job growth of any president since Herbert Hoover. The typical worker has seen her wages decline over the eight years of the Bush presidency, and she has seen none of the benefits of the period's productivity growth. In addition, tens of millions of homeowners are seeing the bulk of their wealth disappear in the housing crash. This is the record senator John McCain has embraced by making Bush's tax cuts the centrepiece of his economic agenda. Choosing an economic policy that has been a proven failure is a bold and risky strategy in a presidential campaign, but McCain is betting that the media will be so incompetent that they will not notice. He may be right. For example, last week National Public Radio (NPR) did a report on the tax cut proposals of McCain and senator Barack Obama. The report correctly told listeners that the McCain's proposals will give more money to the wealthy, while Obama's would give more money to the middle class. However, after presenting a solid analysis of the distributional impact of the tax cut proposals, NPR decided to tell its listeners about the "big ideas" behind these two proposals. We were told that the big idea behind the Obama plan was "fairness", which could also be called "redistribution". It was nice for NPR to tell its listeners what pejorative term can be used to describe the tax cut. I suppose it can also be called "socialism", "communism" or "Arthur", but NPR was good enough to stop at redistribution. However, the reporting really got outrageous when NPR told us that the big idea behind the McCain plan was "growth". We could perhaps have an interesting debate about whether giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country is a good way to promote growth, if we didn't already know the answer. We have had almost eight years of Bush tax cuts, and the record is as clear as it could possibly be. When it comes to producing economic growth that benefits the middle class, the tax cuts were dismal failures. The economy is now in the process of sinking into the second recession of the Bush administration. At the current rate of job loss, it is entirely possible that Bush will have created fewer private sector jobs in his entire eight years in office than the 2.6 million jobs the Clinton administration created annually. The average worker's wage will almost certainly be lower when Bush leaves office in January of 2009 than when he took office in January of 2001. This means that most workers will have seen nothing from the benefits of productivity growth over the last eight years. Certainly Bush cannot be blamed for everything that went wrong, but it does not make sense to claim that his policies bear no responsibility for this economic failure. Bush was left in charge of the store (he also controlled both houses of Congress through most of his presidency), and we got cleaned out. Imagine if some big government Democrat had this track record. This is why it is absurd for McCain to present himself as the candidate of jobs and growth. We are doing his policies now - and they don't work. McCain should be embarrassed to push these policies given the huge failure sitting in front of our faces, but he is counting on the media to turn the issue into a he said/she said. McCain is betting that the media will treat the failure of the Bush-McCain economic policy as a matter of partisan contention, rather than as a fact, like gravity. Thus far he has been right. He did a test run of media gullibility a couple of weeks ago when he proposed drilling for oil offshore in environmentally sensitive areas. He proposed this as a response to $4-a-gallon gas. This was McCain's way of showing that he cares for the working stiff. Of course, McCain knows that the amount of oil potentially available offshore in environmentally sensitive areas is too small to have a noticeable impact on prices and that it will take a decade before we even see a drop. But, he wanted the media frame of being the guy who was willing to sacrifice the environment in order to help Joe Sixpack. It worked like a charm. The media contrasted Obama's concern with the environment (portrayed as out of touch and elitist) with McCain's concern for jobs and growth. If McCain could look good proposing a policy that jeopardises the environment for no visible economic benefit, why not push an economic policy that is a proven failure, as though the past eight years never happened? As P.T. Barnum should have said: "No one ever lost an election underestimating the gullibility of the US media." - This article was published on July 14, 2008 by The Guardian Unlimited. The Meltdown Lowdown (No. 13)
This week in economic news: McCain advocates
balancing the budget with magic, Greenspan is
either a liar or a fool, and government lenders
sag under the weight of bad mortgages.
By Dean Baker McCain Comes Out for a Balanced Budget (With Tax Cuts) John McCain would like to claim the legacy of the last popular Republican president, Ronald Reagan. He took a big step toward that goal on Monday when he explained his plans to balance the budget by 2013. Just like Reagan, Sen. McCain claims he can cut taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget. For his next trick, he will juggle 27 flaming bowling balls, while standing on one foot on the back of a charging bull, blindfolded. Those keeping score will remember that the deficit exploded in the Reagan years. It was 2.6 percent of gross domestic product in the last Carter budget but exploded to 6 percent of GDP -- the largest deficit of the post-World War II era -- by 1983. The debt to GDP ratio rose from 32.6 percent at the end of 1981 to 53.1 percent after the last Reagan budget in 1989. Prior to Reagan, the debt to GDP ratio had been falling consistently since World War II under both Democratic and Republican presidents. If McCain thinks that promising tax cuts, higher defense spending, and a balanced budget is "straight talk," what would he consider lying? What If They Are Telling the Truth? When a high-powered official makes some really harebrained statement about the economy, I always assume that it is for political purposes and that he or she really knows what's going on. For example, Alan Greenspan told The Washington Post recently that he first became aware of the explosion in sub-prime mortgage debt in January of 2006, his last month as Fed chairman. But the growth in sub-prime lending was not a trade secret -- by 2006 it was a widely noted development among people following the housing market and the economy. In the same vein, Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, complained last week about the weak dollar at the same time he defended the European Central Bank's (ECB) recent interest-rate hike. Presumably, one of the main reasons that the ECB raised interest rates was to strengthen the euro (and thereby weaken the dollar) in an effort to fight inflation. The higher value of the euro against the dollar and other currencies makes U.S. goods cheaper in Europe, causing Europeans to buy more imports and fewer domestically produced goods. (Cheaper imports also lower prices more generally in the euro zone, another way to reduce inflationary pressure.) The lower dollar also raises the price of European exports, causing people in the United States to buy fewer of them. Higher imports and lower exports will have the effect of slowing growth in the European economies, thereby throwing workers out of work and decreasing their bargaining power, which is how central banks fight inflation. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to both support the rate hike by the ECB and complain about a weak dollar, although the higher interest rate also slows the European economy through other mechanisms. If Barroso didn't want a weak dollar, then he should be opposed to the rate hike. Anyhow, when prominent figures like Greenspan and Mr. Barroso make statements that really don't make any sense, I have always assumed that they were doing it out of some political calculation. But what if these people are actually being honest and really don't have a clue? Let's hope they are just liars. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Are Going Down. Who Could Have Known? The stocks of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both fell by more than 15 percent on Monday. These giant companies were established by the federal government to facilitate homeownership through the creation of a secondary mortgage market. The secondary mortgage market allowed the banks or savings and loans that made mortgages to resell them, which meant that they could get more capital to issue new mortgages. This effectively transformed mortgage markets from local to national or international markets. In the last quarter, Fannie and Freddie, along with the Federal Housing Authority and the Department of Veterans Affairs, either issued or backed 80 percent of new mortgages. Essentially, as the private mortgage-financing system collapsed, the quasi-public system has risen to fill the gap. However, Fannie and Freddie could not possibly have remained immune to the tidal wave of bad mortgage debt coming in the wake of the housing collapse. The only real question was when the size of their losses would become clear to the financial markets and analysts and impair their ability to finance new mortgages. It now seems as though that time has come. The precipitating factor may have been a report from a research firm warning that a major mortgage insurer, with whom Freddie Mac had substantial dealings, may see its credit downgraded. This would leave Freddie Mac more exposed to losses on bad mortgages. The prospect of this downgrading, combined with negative reports from Lehman brothers and other analysts, sent their stocks plummeting. CBO Projects Housing-Bailout Program Will Send 140,000 Families Into Second Foreclosure It's amazing what you can find reading obscure documents from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO's analysis of the Dodd-Frank housing-bailout package projects that 35 percent of the 400,000 homeowners (140,000) who get a new mortgage through the program will still eventually be unable to pay their bills and will lose their homes in foreclosure. These families can look forward to two or three more years of struggling to pay their mortgages, sacrificing health care, child care, and other necessary expenses in order to hang on to their home. At the end of the day, these 140,000 families will end up out on the street with nothing. This is what D.C. policy wonks call "asset building." Can NPR Get Serious on Global Warming? NPR reported Monday on efforts at the G-8 summit to reach an agreement on global warming. It reported without comment President Bush's insistence that the U.S. will not agree to restrict its emissions until China and India also sign on. If NPR had a real reporter deal with this topic, she would have told listeners that China's and India's emissions of greenhouse gases are less than one-fourth as much per person as U.S. emissions. No leader of these countries would ever agree to a treaty that permanently committed them to a much lower level of emissions than the U.S. and Europe. (What would be the rationale -- do they have the wrong skin color or are they being punished for not having done more to pollute the planet in the past?) Without this context, many NPR listeners might actually think that President Bush was trying to arrange a serious agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. -- This article was published on July 10, 2008 by TAP (The American Prospect) Online.
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Three Women Elected to Top Three Officer Positions at American Federation of Teachers July 14, 2008 Contact: Steve Smith 202-637-5018
Statement by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney on the Election of Three New Top Officers at the American Federation of Teachers
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) today elected three outstanding new top leaders -- Randi Weingarten as president, Antonia Cortese as secretary-treasurer and Lorretta Johnson as executive vice president. All three have repeatedly shown their passion, commitment and success in improving the lives of working families. The election of three women to the top offices of this great union is a new milestone and an important step for the labor movement.
From her early days as a social studies teacher to her recent success in leading the United Federation of Teachers, Randi has shown herself to be a strong advocate for teachers, students and workers from many professions. Her impressive record in support of working families leaves no doubt that Randi will be a champion for the working women and men of the AFT – and beyond.
Antonia Cortese has served the past four years as AFT executive vice president and Lorretta Johnson, president of AFT-Maryland, currently serves as president of the Baltimore Teachers Union’s paraprofessional chapter.
AFT President Edward McElroy and
Secretary-Treasurer Nat LaCour, who have retired from their
positions, have inspired us all and left an indelible mark on
the American labor movement. Their unselfish concern for their
members and working people everywhere was the hallmark of their
tenure. We know their advocacy on behalf of working families
will not end with retirements. |
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McCain Pledges
Allegiance to NAFTA |
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Wal-Mart Guilty
State Court Rules Wal-Mart Repeatedly Violated Minnesota Wage and Hour Laws Bureau of Nation Affairs: News 7/10/08 ST. PAUL, Minn.--Wal-Mart Stores Inc. must pay more than $6.5 million in compensatory damages to a class of workers in Minnesota who alleged that the company repeatedly violated the state's labor laws by requiring them to work off the clock during training and by failing to provide them full rest and meal breaks, a state court judge ruled June 30 (Braun v. Wal-Mart Inc., Minn. Dist. Ct., No. 19-CO-01-9790, 6/30/08). The 151-page ruling issued by Dakota County District Court Judge Robert R. King Jr. found that the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer violated various state laws millions of times over the six-year period covered by the lawsuit. A second trial to determine if the company must pay civil penalties and punitive damages is scheduled for Oct. 20. An attorney for the plaintiffs said Wal-Mart also could be forced to pay attorneys' fees and costs. That issue is unlikely to be resolved before the end of this year, he said. Daphne Moore, spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the company is considering an appeal. She said it is Wal-Mart policy to pay every worker for every hour worked and provide them both rest and meal breaks.
According to the court's findings of fact, Wal-Mart's Store Total Activity Review (STAR) audits indicated that store associates were missing their breaks. A November 2003 STAR audit showed that every Minnesota store audited scored "unsatisfactory" in the portion of the audit dealing with rest and meal break compliance. The court found that although Wal-Mart argued that the audits were methodologically unsound, common sense indicated that if the company felt the audits were flawed, it would not have continued to use them. The court added that Wal-Mart stopped recording rest break "swipes"--akin to punching in or out on a time clock--in early 2001. By not recording when employees were taking their breaks, the court wrote, Wal-Mart no longer had a systematic method for determining whether employees were receiving their rest breaks. It added that the action diminished Wal-Mart's ability to monitor and enforce break compliance. The court found that deciding not to record employee swipes could be construed as evidence of missed breaks. It found that Wal-Mart's payroll pressures could have affected employee breaks. The court observed that the company discourages overtime and seeks to have store payrolls account for smaller and smaller percentages of their budgets. By doing so, the court said, it could affect store managers' ability or desire to adequately staff their stores. Smaller staffs, the court wrote, could lead to reduced compliance with rest and meal break requirements.
Perl added that the second trial also would determine punitive damages. He said while the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that punitive damages could be limited to a one-to-one ratio with compensatory damages, he did not believe that ratio would apply to the Wal-Mart case. Perl said punitive damages can be higher when a company's actions are difficult to detail or when the compensatory damages awarded are not terribly large. He said the award of $6.5 million for 56,000 plaintiffs is not a terribly large verdict. Moore said Wal-Mart is considering an appeal. She said the company continues to disagree with the court's granting class-action status, believing that the experiences of a handful of workers cannot translate into the experiences of thousands of workers. Furthermore, she said, more witnesses testified on Wal-Mart's behalf that it properly paid it workers and that properly provided them rest and meal breaks. Jonathan Parritz, Kai Richter, Andre LaMere, and Jennifer Benowitz, also of Maslon Edelman, represented the plaintiffs, as did William Sieben of Schwebel Goetz & Sieben in Minneapolis, and Rodney Bridgers and Nathan Axvig of Franklin Azar & Associates. Wal-Mart was represented by Neal Manne, Victoria Cook, Shawn Rabin, David Orozco, and Kalpana Srinivasan of Susman Godfrey in Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles; Jerry Blackwell of Blackwell Burke in Minneapolis; and James Kremer of Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis.
Text of the
decision may be accessed at
http://op.bna.com/dlrcases.nsf/r?Open=vros-7g5qzc.
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Congress
Votes to Extend Unemployment Benefits |
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Wall Street Journal |
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American Negotiator on China Joining World Trade Organization:
We Got it Wrong Failed Expectations in US Trade Policy
We failed to
address the underlying fundamental market distortions that skew
the benefits toward the few while leaving the rest of the
economy less well off. As global US financier George Soros, in a
Bloomberg News interview on the financial crisis, recently said,
"... the system, as it currently operates, is built on false
premises." The premise on which our trade agreements are
negotiated is at best flawed, if not broken The next
administration has to take a hard look at the trade agreements
currently on the table - especially with South Korea ‑ and ask:
Who benefits? The answers should lead to a fundamental
reassessment of what needs to be included in those trade
agreements so that the benefits flow to broader and more
equitable segments of the economy.
China's
agreement to enter the WTO is a perfect example of failed
expectations. To join the WTO, China made unilateral concessions
to reduce and, in some cases, eliminate barriers to entry for US
goods and
Conversely, it
is doubtful that the US economy or its workers are better off.
US manufacturing jobs have declined by more than 2.5 million
since China joined the WTO in 2001. While services jobs
increased during this period, with the exception of
telecommunications, non‑tradable jobs accounted for the most
significant portion of that increase. Wages have been stagnant
and real disposable income for three‑quarters of US households
has been stable or declining. Only the top quartile of families
has seen significant increases in real disposable income. The
beneficiaries of these trade agreements try to divert attention
by arguing that our trade in services has increased or that our
competitiveness has declined. Those arguments are simply
diversions because they don't explain why our exports of goods
to countries that made no concessions increased more than our
exports to China, which made significant tariff and non‑tariff
concessions. Such arguments also fail to explain why our imports
of goods from China increased more than our imports from other
major trading partners. Is there any wonder that the people on
Main Street think that trade agreements do not work? Were this
simply a problem with our bilateral trade relationship with
China, policy makers could focus on resolving that dysfunctional
relationship. However, the problem extends to nearly all trade
agreements since they are based on the flawed premise that free
trade benefits the economy. The premise is flawed and broken
since free trade does not exist in a "free market" petri dish
where all other factors are neutral.
While China
has been appreciating its currency, it has a long way to go to
bring it to equilibrium levels. In addition, China's internal
barriers to trade not only restrict US exports but also restrict
China's
While these
restrictive policies have little or no effect on our free trade
agreements with many of the smaller economies, they do have a
significant negative impact on our agreements with the larger
economies. While focus has been placed on labor and
environmental standards, until and unless we are able also to
incorporate factors such as currency undervaluation and the lack
of competition policy into our trade policy, the premise of
"free trade" will fail to deliver its promises, whether
delivered by Democrats, Republicans, or both. With the current
financial and recessionary crisis, many
"traditionalist" thinkers will likely pull out the old premises,
arguing to conclude the Doha Round and pass legislation enacting
recently signed free‑trade agreements as a means of alleviating
the crisis.
Once again, multinational companies and financial institutions
and their beneficiaries.
Before we
blindly accept FTAs that will simply result in lost jobs, the
next administration needs also to address comprehensively the
disparities in international monetary and competition policies
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Paul Ryan Drinks McCain Health Insurance Kool-Aid May 22, 2008 Contact: David Newby 414-581-0942
On May 21, Congressman Paul Ryan released his “Roadmap for America's Future", which includes a health insurance reform proposal just about identical to that proposed by Senator John McCain (is that a coincidence?). If ever adopted, it would move us even further away from quality, affordable health care for everyone in America.
Ryan starts by adopting McCain's proposal to count the value of any employer-provided health insurance as taxable income. Most comprehensive family health insurance policies cost on average at least $10,000 a year. So workers would have to pay taxes on this amount added to their regular wages.
What do we get in return? A tax credit or payment of $5000 for a family so you can buy your own insurance. What a deal! You pay more taxes and get a credit that pays at best half the cost of a good family health insurance policy. This is health care reform?
Ryan adds other measures as well: the virtual elimination of state standards for health insurance policies, promotion of Health Savings Accounts (which means you pay high yearly deductibles with pre-tax income—if you have enough), and totally inadequate access for those with pre-existing conditions to get the health insurance they need in the private “market'.
The Ryan-McCain approach to health care “reform” is topsy-turvy. It does not improve the current unfair, unworkable, unsustainable health insurance industry. Instead it attempts to subject even more people to the tyranny and capriciousness of insurance industry-provided health care. It leaves us at the mercy of health insurance companies and their insatiable appetite for profit. It presumes that quality of health care will improve, but leaves that to the magical workings of the “market”.
“I suppose this is a good proposal if you want John
McCain to choose you as his Vice Presidential running mate,”
said David Newby, President of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.
“But if you want health care reform which guarantees that
everyone will have affordable access to the quality health care
they need, you'd better look elsewhere. We don't need
Ryan/McCain tinkering with our broken health care system: we
need broad reform which guarantees that everyone in America gets
the health care they need, regardless of income or health
status.” |
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Strike Threat Wins Aramark Contract  United and ready to fight, workers fought back concessions and won decent wage increases as part of a new contract for close to a hundred workers at Aramark's industrial laundry on Madison's far east side. "Delicious" was how UNITE HERE Local 229's president Rosie Reml described the gains in the new contract -- a $1,250 bonus in the first year, wage increases of 3 percent in the second year, and 2.5 percent increases in third year of the three-year deal. Union members approved the contact yesterday by a vote of 82-2.
In addition, Aramark will continue funding health care at current levels and begin contributing to a new pension plan. The company also agreed to write language guaranteeing "dignity and respect" for workers and their union into the contract.
"We are all very excited! When this started, Aramark looked like they wanted to bust the union," said Reml. "I can't believe we didn't have to give up a thi |
